College could be a big waste of your kids’ time

Spend a few minutes reading about the economy and you come to a deeply unsettling realization: It doesn’t matter how low unemployment gets for some folks. If they lack skills they will stay unemployed.

Like its millennial dating counterpart, ghosting is cutting off contact with no explanation. The employee takes a new job and doesn’t bother to give notice or even contact the last employer.

“Shark Tank” star Robert Herjavec wrote about the problem of college recently, and it got me interested in how fast expectations are changing. I won’t drill down into the wonky economics of this, but for decades we made our kids worry about what experts call a “vertical mismatch,” that is, not having enough education.

You know the drill. Don’t stop at high school, go to college. Don’t stop at undergrad, get a masters or go to law school. Do the M.B.A., you’ll need it.

But technology and a rapidly changing world mean that many new, good-paying jobs not only require new skills but skills that you can get only by doing the job.

No degree will suffice because almost nobody teaches real job skills in these new areas — artificial intelligence, cybersecurity consulting (Herjavec’s field), and so on. Maybe in a decade the current practitioners will join the academy, but right now they’re in high demand and working.

A perfect degree

What kids need to get a foothold, increasingly, is real work experience. And that’s the “skills mismatch” plaguing companies now. Too many applicants show up with a four-year degree but nothing else to offer.

Herjavec addressed this problem in his own blog. “Education is critical, but there’s no reason to go into massive debt for the ‘perfect’ degree, or multiple degrees in the same field,” Herjavec says.

“Where I get worried is when I see students shying away from putting their degrees to practice in the job market in favor of adding another minor or perhaps a masters.

“Unless you need a specific degree for your career (for example, you’re getting a professional certification), your ability, experience, drive etc. are far more important,” he says.

Parents of young adults too often indulge grown kids’ “passions” at the expense of letting them make their own mistakes, learn, and grow. Helicopter parenting soon turns into helicopter adulting.

A Merrill Lynch study found that Americans spend $500 billion a year supporting supposedly grown adults. Alarmingly, that’s twice the figure people save for their own retirements.

I get it. Nobody wants to see their kid adrift. It’s hard to raise a child from birth to 18 and then let go, to let them experience rejection, to risk failure.

Resilience

But the mom-and-dad safety net is expensive. Never mind paying for costly college tuition. We finance first homes, cover daily bills, offer business “loans” that don’t get paid back, and plunk down cash for grandkids’ schooling.

If you have $10 million in the bank and you feel like sharing your kids’ inheritance while you’re alive, that’s fine, really.

But the risk is twofold: One, your adult kids could easily drift right into their 30s with no real coping skills. The first truly tough life event — a job lost, a divorce, health issues — and they might find they have no “grit,” no resilience of their own to fall back on.

Second, and I see this too often, the financial burden is light on the child but increasingly heavy on the aging parent.

Your kids can borrow to pay for graduate school. You cannot borrow to finance an assisted living facility. They can hitchhike Europe on a student budget. You can’t ask the bank to cover your utility bills if you happen to make it to 95.

The bottom line is tough love. Don’t shame your kids into following your path just because it worked for you. High expectations are fine, but their way forward might be different from yours.